Nowadays, one of the most important marketing assets for vacation rental owners and serviced apartment operators is digital guidebooks. A digital guidebook includes an introduction of your property and essential information about it, such as its amenities, the restaurants, cafes, and entertainment or shopping centres nearby. At the moment, there are various companies that provide property managers with digital guidebooks. However, choosing between them, especially between Hostfully and Touchstay can cause a bit of confusion.
We’ve realised that go with either of the two is one of the questions most vacation rental managers have in mind. So, we’ve asked Mark Simpson, the founder of Boostly Academy to share with us his experience and opinion about the two giants.
This blog post has been written based on one of Mark Simpson’s videos that directly replies to the question of Hostfully vs Touchstay. We hope you’ll find it useful.
Table of Contents
Hostfully vs Touchstay
My name is Mark Simpson and I give the hosts all over the world, just like you, the tools, the tactics, the training, but most importantly the confidence to go and get more direct bookings and I’ve been asked a question, who should I go with for my digital guidebook?
Should I go for Touchstay or Hostfully? And here is my honest answer after testing and trialing both ends knowing both of the owners and the people who worked there for years, my honest answer is, I would go for both.
The reason why is that they are both fantastic, and they are both two of the biggest people in the digital guidebook world. And I’m a massive fan of both of them.
My main advice to you is to go and test each one.
Hostfully vs Touchstay Pricing
Hostfully, you can start for free. So, head over to hostfully.com. Register an account and use the free tools for the free guidebook. Go and test out, see how you like it, see how to use it, see if you can get used to it.
Touchstay has a very very small charge, but again it’s a fantastic service, it’s a fantastic team helping you.
Why You Need a Digital Guidebook for Your Short-term Rentals
The most important thing that I want to tell you is that you need to get a digital guidebook in 2021 and beyond. It’s going to be one of the most important marketing tools that you can have because instead of having something just lying on your kitchen table when somebody arrives (and some of them are never going to read), you can get them excited about your stay before the booking by sending them the link to the digital guidebook that they can look at on their phone or on their computer. They can already get to source out the area, your recommendations, they can already start to book things.
And if you do it right, then you can add in upsells that you can actually start to make more recurring income coming into your business through it.
Digital guidebooks give you that. And they also give you the ability to answer every question that a guest potentially has even before they arrive in your property.
The Power of Digital Guidebooks
If you do a digital guidebook right, then a guest should never have an open-ended question before arriving into your property and that’s the power of a digital guidebook.
So, whether you choose Touchstay or you choose Hostfully, my advice to you is to go and get one and get it set up and get it implemented into your business. I recommend both of them. I love both of them. I think they’re fantastic people who work there; Brad, David, and the gang at Hostfully, and Andy and Tiana at Touchstay, I know them all really well. And it’s like asking who’s my favourite child and I have three of them.
So, I can’t do that, and I can’t do this. So, please see this video. Please take my advice. If you do one thing in 2021 is go and get a digital guidebook.
To Sum up: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Digital Guidebooks
What Mark has been trying to tell us through his suggestions is that instead of putting hours of your time into thinking about Hostfully vs Touchstay and which one to use, just go for them and give each of them a try.
At last, there is no point in procrastinating the process of creating tailored digital guidebooks for your properties as if you do not have one by now, you’re already one step behind the competition.
We’re living in a digital era, so why not enhance your guest experience by using these beneficial, easy-to-use tools?
If you are looking for a sample to help you, you can click here and download the sample directly.
